Customer Service from Stewart’s Perspective

Because customer service relies so heavily on responding to a customer’s unique needs, Stewart focuses a great deal of time on truly getting to know our customers.

In addition to regular interaction, we’ve found that surveys are a great tool for generating customer insight. But frequency of surveying is important. Customers may get annoyed if they’re queried too often, while reaching out to them too seldom will only garner insights from one slice in time, which lacks accuracy.

Stewart has overcome this challenge by targeting different customer segments each month to get continual feedback without polling the same group too frequently. We’ve also found that organizing our customers in subgroups helps uncover deeper insights into their unique needs. Customizing our processes to serve the unique priorities of our lender, realtor and builder/developer customers help improve their satisfaction with our services.

For instance, current regulations and the location-based nature of fees pressure lenders to provide accurate quotes in a short timeframe. In the future, quick quotes will become even more important with the new CFPB legislation. In order to help our lenders deliver local, quick and accurate quotes, we created an online quote calculator that creates Good Faith Estimates which incorporate title-related costs required under the new HUD-1 rules and location fees.

Our realtor customers want to keep their clients happy with frequent updates. Knowing this, Stewart offers 24/7 access to our online transaction management system. Through the system, a REALTOR® can log in anytime, anywhere and also enable the buyer or seller file access as well. Because REALTORS® work in their cars instead of at computers, they don’t have time to constantly login to the system to check progress. We send our realtors one Weekly Summary Report emails for each transaction. Sending multiple emails may seem counter intuitive, but it provides better customer service for their clients; realtors can forward the reports directly to their clients from the field, without editing and separating transactions.

Realtors also want to simplify transactions, which get increasingly complicated as more parties get involved. So by offering related products like home warranties and home insurance, we help simplify the transaction by enabling them to consolidate services with fewer partners. At the same time, we generate more business and increase our touch points with these valued customers.

In large cities, new construction is back on the rise, and builders and developers are in need of specialized service. Stewart has responded by stocking many large offices with dedicated builder/developer representatives who specialize in builder transactions. In smaller offices, we’ve cross-trained our representatives to better service our builder customers. Further, we’ve seen that builders and developers need a titling process that they can follow from raw acquisition and entitlement issues all the way to a sale to consumer. Our online system accommodates these needs throughout the process.

By catering to our customers’ specific wants and needs, and adapting our processes based on their feedback, we tailor a customer service program that enables our customers to better serve their own customers. When that happens, everyone wins.